


The Old Gods Demand It

by CommaSplice



Series: Aegon Targaryen Memorial Library Universe [7]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-24
Updated: 2014-01-24
Packaged: 2018-01-09 21:16:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1150874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CommaSplice/pseuds/CommaSplice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rickon Stark has a crush on Shireen Baratheon. Attempting to ease into a situation where she might be willing to date him, he asks her to help him bake some cookies without telling her why. When she asks the reason, he gets flustered. A little lie soon grows rapidly out of control.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Old Gods Demand It

**Author's Note:**

  * For [crossingwinter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/gifts), [Vana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vana/gifts).



> This is set in my Game of Stacks 'verse, but you should be able to read it on its own. 
> 
> Asha lives with Stannis (as do Cersei, Myrcella, and Tommen). Stannis and Selyse are divorced and Melisandre lives with her.
> 
> I aged the kids and yes, I am aware that there should be more of a gap between Shireen and Rickon. But it's an AU so, it is what it is.

* * *

Rickon was used to getting strange looks from his siblings and Theon. “What?”

“You asked Shireen Baratheon to help you _bake_ something?” Theon gaped at him. “Why didn’t you just ask her out on a date?”

“Dad won’t let me drive.”

Bran stared at him like he had two heads. “So what? He or Mum would drive you both somewhere.”

“ _I_ would drive you,” Robb volunteered.

“I don’t see why he won’t let me take the car.”

Robb rubbed the back of his neck. “Because you’re fourteen.”

“Fourteen is old enough to drive a tractor.” He’d looked it up.

Bran threw a wadded up piece of paper at him. “Only if you live on a farm, dumbass, which we don’t. It’s not like we even have a tractor.”

“I’ll be fifteen in six months.”

“It’s still too young. You don’t have a license and you don’t know how to drive.”

Rickon waved this objection away. “I already know how to hotwire cars. I can drive.”

“You can’t drive. You crashed Arya’s car into Mr. Liddle’s oak tree.”

“I bumped it. It’s not the same thing.”

“It cost Mum and Dad $200 to fix. You crashed it,” Bran repeated.

Robb brought the conversation back to what he thought was the immediate point. “Call Shireen back; ask her out; I will drive you two wherever you want to go. You could take her out to eat and then to a movie.”

Rickon didn’t like this idea. “I’ll look like a baby. I wonder if Mr. Liddle would help me make a fake ID. Then I could hotwire Mom’s car and—”

“No,” all of his siblings said at once.

“Why not?”

Dad walked through the kitchen. “Because Stannis Baratheon not only knows how old you are, he is conversant with the legal age at which someone may drive, and he is hardly about to allow you to take out his daughter under those circumstances.”

“Oh.”

“And because if you commit one more criminal act, you’ll be spending the rest of your vacations and breaks at the Wall with Benjen and Jon working for the Night’s Watch until you’re old enough to sign up for good.” He sorted through the pile of bills. “Don’t bother Mr. Liddle anymore.” 

“Mr. Liddle likes me helping him.” 

Dad set his jaw. “Leave the man alone. I don’t need you turning into a revolutionary on top of everything else.” He picked up the mail and left them.

It wasn’t fair the way his parents were always sneaking up on him.

“Why baking, dumbass?” Bran asked after Dad was gone.

“Sansa suggested the baking thing.” Rickon tried to remember her exact words. “She said it would give Shireen and I a chance to get know each other without pressure, and that it would show her that I was ‘secure in my masculinity.’ And then after that I should ask her out.”

Theon’s eyes went skyward.

“She probably read that in _Cosmopolitan,_ ” Robb muttered.

“Besides it’s all set up. We’re going to make cookies. Sansa and Margaery are going to come over and help me figure out what to wear for the baking and then for the real date.” They started laughing at him then. “What?” he demanded as they all doubled over.

* * *

Shireen let Rickon into the kitchen. She didn’t quite understand why he needed to bake cookies in the first place. Rickon had said it was for a ritual to the old gods. The old gods were one of the few deities her mother hadn’t chosen to worship, but Shireen had been under the impression that it was a fairly simple religion. She hadn’t known the old gods required offerings, let alone offerings of baked goods.

Religion made Shireen very uncomfortable, but Rickon had been very nice to her at school, and other than Tommen he was the only boy who stood up for her whenever Little Walder Frey picked on her. So when he asked her, helping him felt like the right thing to do.

She took his coat. “Why are you all dressed up?” 

“Uh.” Rickon’s face grew pink. “The old gods demand it?”

“Okay.” Shireen thought she might ask her mother about the old gods tonight.

Rickon set the bag with the ingredients on the counter. 

Asha came into the kitchen to grab a soda. “What are you two up to?”

Shireen explained about Rickon needing to bake a sacrifice for the old gods.

“Uh huh.”

Rickon’s cheeks went from pink to a dull red. 

“I’ll hang up your coat.”

“No, kiddo. I’ll do it. You two go ahead with your baking.” Asha looked straight at Rickon. “I’ll be around today. I may come through here more than a couple of times. That’s not going to be a problem, is it?”

It seemed to Shireen that Asha was speaking directly to Rickon although she couldn’t think why. 

“No, ma’am,” Rickon told her.

“Don’t call me ma’am. Just Asha is fine. I work with your dad and Theon has told me a lot about you. An awful lot.” There was another meaningful look before she left them.

Shireen turned to Rickon. “Are you allowed to wear an apron?”

Rickon seemed startled, but then he said that yes, the old gods would be fine with an apron.

She opened up the cookbook for the recipe for gingersnaps. “First we read the recipe.” 

Rickon moved right up next to her and bent over the book.

Was he sniffing her hair? No, he couldn’t possibly be. “I’ll go get you an apron.”

“Shouldn’t we read the recipe together?”

She couldn’t think of a reason to object so she stayed where she was. 

“Okay,” Rickon said after a moment. “So it’s like the time I made the bomb from Mr. Liddle’s special cookbook.”

“What? Who’s Mr. Liddle?” 

“He’s our next door neighbor. I just meant, well, there are steps we have to follow,” Rickon elucidated. “Right?”

Shireen didn’t understand what this had to do with bomb making, but she nodded. She found an apron for him. It was Daddy’s, but he never wore it so she didn’t think he would mind. She set the oven to 375⁰F. “I’ll be right back.” 

“I’ll set out the ingredients.” He read aloud the slogan on the apron “I’m a librarian. What’s your superpower?” and shrugged as he tied it around himself. 

Shireen went upstairs to Myrcella’s room. She related what he had said. 

Myrcella was as perplexed as she was. “That’s really weird.” Then her face cleared. “At one of those dinners of Father’s, they served us something called a bombe. It was a molded dessert made out of ice cream. He must have meant that.”

It still didn’t make a lot of sense, but she preferred it to the alternative. 

“Do you want me to come down there with you?”

“Asha said she would be around. Maybe you could tell her what he said and see what she thinks?” 

Myrcella thought this was a good idea.

Shireen returned to the kitchen. 

Rickon had emptied the bag of things he’d brought and had everything in a sort of assembly line.

“We need to grease the cookie sheets,” Shireen told him. Through the door that led to the hall, she saw Myrcella padding down the front stairs into the living room.

“I brought this stuff; it’s called parchment paper, although it doesn’t look like parchment to me.” He pointed to a box. “Sansa said it’s less messy. She used to do a lot of baking.” He inspected the cookie sheets and carefully ripped off pieces and placed them inside the pans.

“If your sister knows about baking, why didn’t you go to her for help?” 

There was a pause and then a sigh. “She went through some stuff with this crazy professor who kidnapped her.”

“The one who liked to rip pages out of books? Daddy told us about him.”

“Yeah. And she has a lot going on right now.”

This seemed to fit. Shireen didn’t know all the details. Her father, Asha, and Aunt Cersei didn’t talk a lot about it in front of them, but she and her cousins had read about the kidnapping online. Rickon’s parents were probably busy helping Sansa too. She didn’t know Arya well, but she didn’t seem like the domestic type; maybe he didn’t know who else to ask. She looked at the sheets of paper in the cookie sheets. “Won’t they burn?” Now through the pass-through, she could see Asha moving into the dining room with her work. 

Rickon launched into a cogent explanation about smoke points and silicon-treated paper. He clearly knew a lot about the flammability of objects.

Shireen noticed Asha's eyes narrowing. 

Rickon began measuring things. “Could we make a double batch? That way you could have some too.”

Shireen thought it was a nice idea. They worked side-by-side for the next half hour. Rickon was careful and methodical. It was not unlike cooking with Daddy except that Rickon was more sparing with the salt. Every so often he would ask her a question about what they were doing or why they were doing it, but he was otherwise very quiet. Asha came through the room at least three times. 

“You like science, Rickon?” Asha asked him very casually on the last occasion.

“I like chemistry,” he told her. 

“Uh huh. So tell me about ice cream. How do you like to make it?”

“We just get the cartons from the store,” Rickon said puzzled. “Sometimes Mum buys hot fudge or caramel sauce, but usually we eat it plain in a bowl. When Robin was living with us, she would buy cones for him.”

Asha nodded thoughtfully. “You’ve never made fancy desserts out of it?”

“Sansa made a thing called a semifreddo once. It was really good.” 

At this, Asha left them. Shireen watched Asha typing something into the laptop. 

Rickon cleaned up as he went. He was surprisingly neat for a boy. “It’s easier than if you wait till the end,” he told her when she commented on it.

“Daddy says that too.”

“So does Sansa.”

Shireen mixed up the cinnamon sugar to dip the cookies into. “It’s so they get crackly on the top,” she explained to him. She took him through the whole process. They put them in the oven and worked on the next batch. “What made you ask me to help you?”

“Uh . . .” There was a very long pause. “Tommen said you had baked a cake together and that it turned out really well.”

She held the sheet so he could put the cookies on the racks. “Oh. I wish you told me. I could have asked Tommen to join us.”

Rickon turned pink in the face again. “It needs to be a girl,” he said finally. “The old gods demand it.”

“Uh huh,” Asha commented as she walked through.

* * *

It was not going at all the way Rickon had planned. He’d mixed up the outfits Sansa and Margaery had picked out for him and his clothes were all wrong. Theon’s sister kept on trooping into the kitchen. She reminded him of Dad on a bad day in that she made it very clear that she knew exactly what he was up to, and that she wasn’t having any of it.

When she did leave them alone, it was worse. He really liked Shireen. But every time he tried to say something, it came out weird or not at all.

“So tell me more about this sacrifice,” Asha asked in a very casual voice.

Rickon wished he had come up with a better excuse. When he had asked Shireen initially, she wanted a reason and it was the first thing to pop into his head. Not a lot of southerners worshipped the old gods so it wasn’t like she would know. A lot of religions seemed to call for some kind of sacrifice at some point and Rickon didn’t see why the old gods wouldn’t want an offering of something now and then. Why couldn’t it be cookies?

“The way I heard it from Theon, you just go to a godswood and pray before a heart tree. I guess he must have missed the part about the sacrifice of baked goods.”

“It’s a coming-of-age thing,” Rickon lied.

“Oh yeah?”

Shireen carefully divided the cookies into different containers.

Rickon liked the way the tip of her tongue stuck out when she was concentrating. She had a beautiful neck too. She seemed to sense him looking at her, because she turned and smiled at him. He felt his knees weaken a little. He remembered making fun of Sansa when she had liked boys and had gotten soppy over them, but he was beginning to understand how you could go from ordinary to goopy in a matter of minutes.

“When are you performing this ceremony?”

He wished Asha wasn’t so curious. “Uh, later today or tonight.”

“Will your family be there?”

Shireen fitted the lid over the box with Rickon’s half of the gingersnaps. 

“Well, uh,” Rickon hedged. “Everyone’s pretty busy.”

“But you can have people present for the ritual? Like friends?”

Rickon’s attention was focused on admiring Shireen. She normally wore her hair down, but today it was is in a braid. He really liked her ears. “Yeah.” 

The next thing he knew, he was in the hallway clutching a Gladware container of gingersnaps while Myrcella and Shireen put on their coats. Asha thought they should all go to the nearest godswood to support Rickon as he went through his coming-of-age ritual. She would drive.

“It’s not a very exciting ceremony,” he said a little desperately. 

Asha told him blithely it did not matter. She was very interested in the old gods. 

He saw the glances Shireen and Myrcella were exchanging. 

Then Shireen’s father came home with his friend Mr. Seaworth. Asha had a huddled conversation with them and in seconds Mr. Baratheon was glaring at Rickon with narrowed eyes.

Dad pulled in the driveway to pick him up. He got out of the car and joined the grownups. 

It was all over. Rickon could feel it. It was all over in a very bad way. Shireen was going to know what a dumbass he was. She would never talk to him again. He was going to be a joke for the rest of his life. 

“Damn it, Davos. There is nothing humorous about the situation,” Mr. Baratheon was saying.

Mr. Seaworth seemed to think he was wrong, but Dad had a resigned expression on his face and Mr. Baratheon was looking at Rickon without favor.

Myrcella whispered something to Shireen and went back into the house.

Bran would never let him hear the end of it. Shireen would never go out with him now. And Dad was going to ship him off to the Wall.

“I guess your father can take you to the godswood,” Shireen said quietly. 

“Thank you for helping me,” he managed.

“It was kind of fun.” She smiled at him tentatively. “Thanks for letting us keep half the cookies. Daddy likes gingersnaps.”

Facing his execution, Rickon found courage. He turned and began to lean forward to kiss her. 

Shireen didn’t seem to know what he was trying to do, but she didn’t move away either.

“Rickon. Car. Now,” his father called in a voice that brooked no disobedience.

He gave her one last despairing look and got into the car.

Dad waited till they had gone three blocks. “The old gods demand baked goods?” 

Rickon felt his cheeks growing hot. 

“I know I probably don’t want the answer to this, but what in the seven hells were you trying to do in there?”

“I wanted to spend time with Shireen.”

“Why didn’t you just tell her so?”

“Every time I try to say how I feel, it’s like my mouth doesn’t work anymore.”

Dad didn’t look quite so angry anymore. 

“It just came out. I didn’t mean to lie.” 

His father made an audible sigh. “It happens that way sometimes.”

“Was it like that when you met Mum?”

“She was engaged to your Uncle Brandon, but later, I admit there were times when I couldn’t form the words either.” 

Rickon felt a little better. “Why don’t Mr. Baratheon and Asha like me?”

Dad made a left. “I think they’re all very protective of Shireen. She told Myrcella you were talking about making bombs. And Asha knows damn well the old gods do not demand sacrifices of cookies as part of a non-existent coming-of-age ritual. They want to make sure Shireen was safe.”

“But I don’t want to hurt Shireen,” Rickon protested. “I just want to spend time with her. She has the prettiest ears, Dad.”

“Ears?”

Rickon went on oblivious to his father’s surprise. “She has a great smile too and her hair smells so good. Even Sansa’s hair doesn’t smell—”

“Do I want to know how you determined what Shireen’s hair smells like?” Dad answered his own question. “No, don’t tell me.”

Rickon slumped in his seat. “When do I go to the Wall?”

Dad’s lips twitched. “I think the Night’s Watch can survive without your help for now.” He made another left. 

He felt relief washing over him. “Are you going to tell them at home?”

“That depends.”

“On what?” Rickon realized they weren’t going back to the house. “Where are you taking me?”

“To the godswood.”

When they arrived, Dad didn’t get out immediately. 

Rickon watched as his father took the lid off the Gladware container. 

“Why gingersnaps?”

“Shireen suggested them.”

His father took one and held out the container to him. 

“Do we eat them all?” Rickon asked between bites.

“No,” Dad said. “We’ll each have one,” he paused as he finished off a cookie. “Or two, and then we’re going to leave these for the old gods.”

“But—”

His father handed him another cookie. “You told Shireen Baratheon that you were going to make a sacrifice for the gods. Do you like this girl?”

“A lot.” 

“Then you are going to start off on the right foot. A relationship needs a solid foundation; you can’t build one on lies and you shouldn’t lie about the gods.”

“But Asha and her father are going to tell her I was making it up.”

Dad finished off his second cookie. “I assured Asha and Stannis that you didn’t mean any harm. I promised them that your bomb-making days are over. They are over, aren’t they?”

Rickon nodded. 

“And I told them that you were going to make this right—and that you were not going to lie to Shireen again, and in exchange, they agreed to let it go.”

Rickon wasn’t sure what the old gods were going to do with four dozen gingersnaps, but he knew his father was a good man, and if Dad said that this was the way to fix things, it was. 

They got out of the car and walked to the godswood. They placed the Gladware container in front of the heart tree and bowed their heads.

Rickon usually never knew what to pray for, but this time he asked that they help Shireen realize he was not always such a dork.

* * *

Shireen wasn’t privy to all of the details of the new custody agreement, but as far as she knew it, the deal meant that she spent two evenings a week in her mother’s company. The R’hllorites weren’t allowed to be in the house when she was there. It was better without them, but it was still always awkward. She knew her mother was hurt that she didn’t want to live with her, but at the same time, her mother never seemed to notice when Shireen was there.

“I made these for you.” She pushed a small container of gingersnaps over to her mother.

“Thank you.”

“That was very kind of you, Shireen,” Melisandre said.

Shireen smiled politely. Her father said he couldn’t prohibit Melisandre from being present as she lived with Mummy. 

“I will make some tea.” Melisandre wafted out of the living room leaving them alone.

It was hard to know what to say to her mother who never asked questions. If Shireen told her what she was doing in school, Mummy usually just stared at her. Shireen’s eyes fell on the gingersnaps. Her mother was a professor of religious studies. She would know. “Why do the old gods want cookies as a sacrifice?”

“What?”

Shireen repeated her question.

“What is this talk about the old gods?”

She should have known Melisandre wasn’t going to stay in the kitchen. Shireen’s voice grew tight as she asked again for a third time.

Melisandre’s usual expression of serene self-confidence and secret knowledge turned to one of utter confusion. “What?”

Shireen sighed. “Rickon Stark asked me for help baking cookies today. He said he had to make a sacrifice to the old gods and that they demanded baked goods. I thought Mummy would know why because of her job.”

The two women looked at each other. 

“It’s an animistic faith, very simplistic in nature,” Mummy said sounding like the academic she was. “Its practitioners don’t engage in sacrifice, at least they haven’t, not in recent memory. As far as other religions go, I know of no gods that demand baked goods.”

“Oh.” Shireen stared down at her hands. “He must have been making fun of me.” It had sounded off at the time, but some of the religions her mother had followed were so weird, she had thought it might actually be true.

Mummy crossed over to the sofa and sat next to her. “What happened?”

Shireen told her about his phone call and the events of the afternoon. 

“Ah, I think I understand.” Mummy put her arm around her.

It had been years since her mother showed her any kind of attention. 

“This boy likes you.”

Shireen looked up then. Her mother’s eyes were more focused than they usually were. 

“He has a crush on you, Shireen.”

Melisandre was smiling but not unkindly. 

“But—” Maybe she had been right and he had been sniffing her hair? Had he really been about to kiss her? “But why would he make something up about cookies?”

“Men turn into fools around women they lus—like,” Melisandre explained. “The water for the tea will be ready by now.”

“Could you get my pills while you’re at it?”

“Of course, Selyse.”

Shireen was trying to absorb this new idea, but she caught the reference to her mother’s medication. “Are you all right?”

“The doctor gave me a new prescription. It seems to be working better than the old one.” 

Shireen knew her mother suffered from depression and some other things. Her father had explained it to her at length. It was hard not to hope that this time the pills would work. She had been disappointed before. 

“Do you like this boy?”

“Rickon is younger than me.” 

Her mother was thoughtful. “He’s the Starks’ youngest, isn’t he? It’s only one or two year’s difference.”

Shireen wasn’t sure about that. Two years, even one year was a lot when you were in high school. “He’s nice to me, but he’s a little weird. I don’t know,” she said finally. 

Melisandre came back with tea for the three of them and the pills. “It is your move to make,” she said airily as she opened the container.

Her mother took one and nibbled at it. “These are very good.”

“The trees are in for a treat,” Melisandre pronounced with a smile.

Shireen decided she would think about Rickon later.

* * *

Rickon rang the doorbell.

Mr. Baratheon stared at him narrowly. “Yes?”

“Can I—” No, that wasn’t right. Rickon remembered what Sansa had told him about Mr. Baratheon. “ _May_ I speak to Shireen, please?”

“Why?”

“I want to apologize for lying to her.”

It seemed like an eternity to Rickon, but eventually Mr. Baratheon nodded. He did not invite him in beyond the foyer, so Rickon stayed there.

Shireen came a few minutes later. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Daddy said you had something to say to me.”

The words to his carefully prepared speech melted away. He started to speak. Words came out, but they weren’t the right words. 

Shireen seemed more confused than anything. 

He remarshaled his thoughts. “I shouldn’t have lied to you. I just wanted to hang out with you, and I didn’t think you would do it without a reason, so I said the first thing that came into my head. Dad said that was wrong. He took me to the godswood. We left the cookies there and I said a prayer.” He looked down at his feet. “I, uh, I brought this for you.”

And then Mr. Baratheon was there in an instant. “It is not appropriate for you to give my daughter gifts.”

Rickon handed him the plastic shopping bag. “It isn’t a gift. I left your container in the godswood. So I went to the store and bought this. Sansa said Rubbermaid is better than Gladware, but there’s some of that too, just in case.” 

Mr. Baratheon’s cheeks were a funny shade of red. “I see. I apologize for jumping to an incorrect conclusion.”

Rickon nodded. “I got nervous,” he said to Shireen. 

“I get nervous too sometimes,” she told him shyly.

Mr. Baratheon coughed. 

“I have to go, Rickon. I liked baking cookies with you. Maybe we could do it again.” She smiled at him brightly before disappearing into the back of the house.

Mr. Baratheon turned to him. He had concerns about this friendship. There was Rickon’s past. There was an age difference. There was the fact that he had lied to her to gain access to her. Shireen was his daughter and he meant to protect her from anyone or anything that could potentially harm her.

Rickon was still staring at the space where Shireen had been just a moment ago. She was real. She wasn’t like those girls in Robb’s old porno magazines. She was real and she liked him. She liked _him_.

“Well?”

“She’s so nice,” Rickon said dreamily. “She has such a pretty smile.”

“Yes, er, she does.” Mr. Baratheon’s voice grew curious, “When you prayed to those gods of yours, for what did you ask?”

“To be less of a dweeb. I don’t think they heard me.”

Mr. Baratheon didn’t exactly smile, but he suddenly seemed a lot less hostile. “My daughter doesn’t seem to think you are one.”

Rickon was struck by a thought. “Was it the cookies?”

“I am not a religious man, but if the old gods do exist, I am certain that they do not demand baked goods.”

As he left Mr. Baratheon’s big brownstone house, Rickon looked up. He could see Shireen sitting by the window in the turret. He stared at her for a moment and then he turned toward the car where Robb was waiting. Maybe he would see if Robb would take him to the grocery store again and then to the godswood, just in case.

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Vana for keeping me from deleting this!


End file.
